Campaigning

Crazy for Rudy

Many New York political pros believe Rudy Giuliani—former mayor, hero of 9/11, and now presidential candidate—is, quite literally, nuts. The author asks whether Giuliani’s lunatic behavior could be the ultimate campaign asset.

There’s no politician more fun to write about than Rudy Giuliani. He’s your political show of shows—driven to ever greater public outlandishness by a do-anything compulsion always to be at the center of attention. At some point, when he was New York’s mayor, it seemed to stop mattering to him that this attention was, for his political career, the bad kind of attention. Politics appeared no longer to be his interest; to prove, over and over again, that it’s his right—his art, even—to be at the center of attention was. Even this does not really explain the implausibility, and entertainment, of Rudy as a politician.

Rudy Giuliani and his third wife, the former Judith Nathan, who has become a colorful distraction for his campaign. Illustration By André Carrilho.

The explanation for what makes Rudy so compelling among people who know him best—including New York reporters who’ve covered him for a generation, and political pros who’ve worked for him—is simpler: he is nuts, actually mad.

Now, this line should be delivered with the proper timing (smack your head in astonishment when you deliver it). And it implies some admiration and affection: he’s an original. But it is, too, a considered political diagnosis: every student of Rudy Giuliani—indeed, every New Yorker—has witnessed, and in many cases suffered, his periods of mania, political behavior that, in the end, can’t have much of a rational explanation.

So, if you are not from New York, if you haven’t had the pleasure of what Jack Newfield, that querulous old-school New York City columnist and reporter, called “the Full Rudy”—also the title of his 2002 book about the former mayor—you perhaps cannot appreciate our sense of emperor’s-new-clothes incredulity. Despite what’s in front of everybody’s face—behavior that’s not only in the public record but recapped on the front pages every day—becoming president could really happen for Rudy.

No, that is wrong: virtually every Full Rudy veteran expects the implosion to happen any second. It’s in some bizarro parallel reality that the Rudy campaign achieves verisimilitude and even—strange, too, when you consider the cronies and hacks who surround him—appears, at times, adept.

It’s a Catch-22 kind of nuttiness. What with all his personal issues—the children; the women; the former wives; Kerik and the Mob; his history of interminable, bitter, asinine hissy fits; the look in his eye; and, now, Judi!, his current, prospective, not-ready-for-prime-time First Lady—he’d have to be nuts to think he could successfully run for president. But nutty people don’t run for president—certainly they don’t get far if they do.

Newfield, who died in 2004, desperately, and to little avail, tried in his short, apoplectic book to demonstrate the existence of a real Rudy as opposed to the post-9/11 heroic Rudy. “Are you crazy? He’s just insane,” Newfield kept yelling at me over lunch one day, when I was trying to come up with a strategic explanation for Rudy’s wild swings of temperament, judgment, and sense of proportion. (Similarly, Newfield quotes the New York politician Basil Paterson as saying Giuliani has “a devil in him,” and Giuliani’s former school chancellor Rudy Crew as diagnosing a “very, very powerful pathology,” and former New York congressman Rev. Floyd Flake as seeing in Rudy, simply, a deep “mean streak.”)

I argued, having voted for Rudy once, that, in certain contexts, nuttiness—for instance, his need for virtually round-the-clock media attention and affirmation—can be a positive governing approach, as well as an effective public-relations strategy. Rudy’s manic domination of the city’s airwaves and consciousness during New York’s most disturbing crime years, when many people felt the city was beyond anybody’s control, was palliative (David Dinkins, his more modest predecessor, always seemed overwhelmed). And, of course, his hysteric nature was part of what enabled him to appear so reassuring on 9/11: When everyone is crazy, he, being actually crazy, is calm. When everyone is stunned, he’s expressive. (He may be the best off-the-cuff speaker in politics—conversational, witty, personal.)

Here Newfield went on, during lunch, to harangue me about the willful blindness, the consensus cowardice of the media. We (that is, we in the media) quite refuse to acknowledge the possibility that an entirely inappropriate character (a “nutso” was, I believe, Newfield’s term) might be able to navigate all the hurdles and scrutiny of a campaign and actually become president. (The instances—e.g., Howard Dean, Wesley Clark—when oddball candidates do get dinged reinforces the belief that, if you make it, you deserve to make it.) The better your poll numbers are, and the closer you get to being president, the more that certifies you as being sane enough to be president (the Bush and Cheney example notwithstanding).

New York magazine, for instance, has been covering Rudy’s antics for a generation. The magazine was, itself, subject to a famous blitz of Rudy loopiness: he banned from city buses an ad for the magazine with a tagline saying it was “possibly the only good thing in New York Rudy hasn’t taken credit for.” But its recent cover story on the Rudy presidential phenomenon was written by a neophyte political journalist rather than one of the legions of New York reporters who’ve been gobsmacked over the years by Rudy (there’s a whole new generation of reporters who don’t know the real Rudy). So instead of being a story about the sheer preposterousness, the zaniness and lunacy, of the notion of Rudy as president—the exceptionalness of the whole enterprise—it was about, in essence, the logic of perception. Rudy is, necessarily, what others see him as—that was the magazine’s eminently politic point. Similarly, Newsweek, in its Rudy cover story, made the case for transformation by polls—you are what an unexpected number of people are willing to believe you are, no matter how outside the realm of credibility and reason that might be. In both critiques, Rudy is far along in the process of making himself into a realistic presidential being, a legitimate, if curious, front-runner, a man for all seasons, a plausible model—this character famous for his dramatic mood swings—of steadfastness and determination. If he doesn’t implode, then, in fact, he’s sound.

Neither reporter—both of whom accompanied Rudy on his campaign trips—appeared to have asked the obvious question (it’s a reasonable question for all politicians, but it’s professional negligence not to ask it of Rudy): whether he’s on antidepressants or any other pharmacological mood stabilizers.

The developing view among tolerant Republicans and receptive independents seems to be that what happened in New York concerning Rudy ought to stay in New York (except for 9/11, which is an officially nationalized experience, and the Disneyfication of Times Square, which plays in the heartland as well). Even that the city, because it was crazy (and nasty), full of not only criminals but the liberal elite, deserved Rudy. It was beast against beast.

His reign in New York—cutting his opponents dead while micro-managing or attacking the media as he sped off to cop shootings, fires, and water-main breaks—was all about his passions and personality. It was all dramatic persona, a governing style much closer to that of a banana-republic potentate than to your average city administrator’s. (This has a structural explanation: The mayors in most municipalities are constrained by county authorities. The anomalous condition in New York is that the city subsumes five counties, making it a kind of duchy, and giving its chief executive wide discretion and, if he is so inclined, the freedom to act out grandly.)

This translates into a certain kick-assness (of the criminals as well as the liberals). What’s lost in the translation is the neurosis and eccentricity and ludicrousness and hubris of Rudy as supreme ruler. That’s in the finer details.

It’s always worth recapping Giuliani’s famous riposte to a ferret owner who called in to the mayor’s weekly radio show to protest the city’s ban on them as pets: “There is something deranged about you.… The excessive concern you have for ferrets is something you should examine with a therapist.… There is something really, really very sad about you.… This excessive concern with little weasels is a sickness.… You should go consult a psychologist.… Your compulsion about—your excessive concern with it is a sign that there is something wrong in your personality.… You have a sickness, and I know it’s hard for you to accept that.… You need help.”

There were, memorably, his bitter fights with anybody in his administration who got more publicity than he did (especially his police commissioner William Bratton, whom he fired because Bratton got credit for the drop in crime); his refusal (more childish and foot-stamping than strictly racist) to meet with virtually any elected black official during his tenure (justified with a series of odd ruminations: “If you engage in dialogue with political leaders that pander … then you end up watering down your change so much that nothing changes”); his jihadish campaign against the Brooklyn Museum of Art over a painting that mocked the Virgin Mary; and his authoritarian campaign against jaywalkers (resulting in formidable street barricades).

His own children end up, too, as forlorn figures in his imperial city. Given their parents’ marital discord and the mayor’s nonstop parenting of the city, they were often left in the care of the police (at 37,000 strong, the N.Y.P.D., commanded by the mayor, is the largest force in the U.S.). A subject of both humor and concern among Rudy’s closest aides, the children—Caroline, 18, and Andrew, 21—were on a police diet, too. To keep them happy and quiet, the police stuffed them full of food. Father and children are now estranged—his son pointedly says he won’t campaign for his father, because of his demanding golf-training schedule (he learned the game from a member of his police detail); his daughter seems disinclined to speak of her father at all. (On the other hand, there are, perhaps, so many bad fathers in American politics that it might not damage you even if you turn out to be the worst. Even when the children themselves—and I believe this is the first time this has ever happened in a modern presidential campaign—disavow you.)

And Bernie Kerik. There is no circumstance under which a politician with any sense of vulnerability or accountability or merely the need to maintain a sense of appearances hires Bernie Kerik (no less as the police commissioner). Kerik is from Paterson, New Jersey, where I’m from. He came to live in a house in the suburb just down the road from where my parents lived. I knew or had heard the same stories everyone else—my parents and my parents’ friends—had heard. Which it seems impossible Rudy would not have heard, too. And if, somehow, he hadn’t heard them, we know now from Rudy’s own grand-jury testimony that he was, in fact, officially told—though, he says, it didn’t quite register. In other words, one of the most experienced prosecutors of organized-crime figures has spelled out for him what is widely rumored—that his corrections chief and prospective police commissioner might be Mobbed up—and he doesn’t get it. Yup. And then goes on to become business partners with the guy. And then becomes his sponsor for high federal office.

Let’s not even get into the nature of Rudy’s tolerance for whatever Kerik was into, and just focus on Rudy’s sense of impunity—he’s got no sense of caution. (A likely implosion point for the Rudy campaign is Kerik’s anticipated trial for tax fraud and providing false information to federal authorities when he was vetted for the job of homeland-security chief, which Rudy sponsored him for.) It’s about getting away with it. It’s waving the red flag. It’s his assumption that everybody is a pantywaist, except him.

And, speaking of banana republics, there was Rudy’s extra-legal plan to set aside the 2001 mayoral election (after his term limit had been reached, so he couldn’t run again) and, by legislative acclamation (thwarted only at the last minute), extend his term.

Still, say what you want, Rudy’s fearlessness or kookiness does break through the political clutter and leave a powerful impression—that may be the biggest part of the political job.

The wives: if Rudy’s marital history isn’t crazy, it’s surely way over the line of middle-class domestic political norms. You can’t marry your second cousin (Regina Peruggi, now president of Kingsborough Community College) and, on top of that, annul the deal, as though this were the 18th century. You can’t, in a public snit, break up with your wife in a news conference (provoking that wife, Donna Hanover, to call a counter–news conference where she suggested he was a public liar and adulterer). You can’t carry on, as we used to say, in front of everybody, not without some major contrition—not if you want a political future.

Or can you?

Bill Clinton’s sexual life (which now helps make Rudy’s politically viable) is about shame and need, whereas Rudy’s seems to be about an entirely different conception of marriage and family. It’s a resistance to modern marriage—to the man-woman parity thing. He’s unreconstructed, and proudly so. He’s shameless. There’s no apology about Rudy doing what Rudy wants to do. He appears to have had two public relationships as mayor. One was, according to his wife, with Cristyne Lategano, his former communications director, which he made few efforts to hide, and which, even after his wife made the accusation public, Cristyne and he blithely denied. Doubly defying standards of convention, he continued to keep Lategano on a city-related payroll. And then there’s Judi, the current wife. There’s a small effort on Rudy’s part to suggest that one wife leaving and another simultaneously arriving has some wiggle room in the timing—but it’s perfunctory. (In their recent Barbara Walters interview, the couple refused to say how and where they’d met.) He doesn’t care.

This is the “goomah” issue. Rudy has expressed his belief to at least one prospective groom of my acquaintance that marriage is improved by a goomah (as rendered in The Sopranos)—the Italian-American dialect word for a significant other woman. His grandfather had had a goomah, Rudy said, with some sensitivity and depth of feeling, and his father had one, and what worked worked.

Rudy, arguably, is the most anti-family-values candidate in the race (this or any other). And yet, in some sense—which could be playing well with the right wing—what he may be doing is going to the deeper meaning of family values, which is about male prerogative, an older, stubborn, my-way-or-the-highway, when-men-were-men, don’t-tread-on-me kind of thing.

And then there are Rudy’s people. Rudy has always been surrounded by concentric and sometimes intersecting circles of reasonable and professional people and greater and lesser inappropriate types. It is, however, in a way that has limited many local politicians trying to go national, the inappropriate ones that dominate his mind share, staffers who have tended him so long and enabled him so well—“Rudy doesn’t really get along with outsiders” is how it’s gently put—that they are, in their fashion, crazy, too.

“I know,” says an aide in one of the outside circles, “how meshugge they are or worse. Meshugge is a friendly, loving word—some of them are way beyond meshugge.”

There’s a game that’s played by staffers from the more or less reasonable and professional circles, about who might or might not get White House jobs. The game breaks everybody up.

Rudy’s closest adviser, Peter Powers, whom handicappers mark as White House chief of staff, is a grade-school friend. Then there’s Denny Young, often called the consigliere in the Rudy camp in a partly ironic and partly proud identification with Mafia lore. (Powers’s and Young’s marriages both broke up shortly after Rudy ended his.) Next in line is Tony Carbonetti, the son of one of Rudy’s schoolhood chums, who has spent his entire career with Rudy, as aide and operative. “He’ll be Karl Rove, which he isn’t, but that’s how Rudy will treat him,” says a longtime Rudy adviser.

Then Sunny Mindel, his famously intemperate spokeswoman: she’s been relieved of that job in his campaign—she still holds it for the Giuliani business—but is expected to get it back in the White House. No one in any circle has ever quite been able to explain Sunny—except to say that her hysteria matches Rudy’s own, that together they do the things that make for rare, and peculiar, political media, which is Rudy’s sweet spot. (She’s credited with getting Rudy to go to war with the Brooklyn Museum of Art.)

The punch line (this is where everybody breaks up) to the Giuliani White House organization chart is that the intern will be Cristyne Lategano.

Except that now there is an even better East Wing joke. Rudy people tend, when they speak of the prospective First Lady, to use an exclamation point: Judi! (as they often use the exclamation point for Rudy!). Other than to hope that her unlikeliness somehow reinforces the idea of Rudy’s Everyman authenticity, there is no real way that anybody can seem to rationalize Judi, the nurse whom he may or may not have met in a cigar bar (they did often, as the New York Post says, “rendezvous” at Cigars & Bar on West 58th Street in Manhattan). Even among Rudy’s staunchest people, she’s seen as the most likely implosion point. It is not just her hidden first marriage (“Rudy and Judi’s wedding wasn’t a small wedding,” one aide notes. “This was, in New York terms, a royal wedding. There were thousands of stories written about it—and she didn’t think she ought to correct her marital statistics?”), the dead dogs (in the late 1970s she worked for a surgical company that demonstrated its medical staplers on live dogs, which were cut open and stapled shut, pretty much killing them), her voluble discussion of how much money she’s spending on her clothes and on the redecoration of their new house (“She’s spending him dry,” says an aide), the open war with his children (she is said to control access to Rudy), and now her hope to join in on Cabinet discussions (and his apparent hope to have her), but, most problematically, the fact that her interest in publicity is as great as his. “Definitely she’d be up there with Eleanor Roosevelt and Hillary Clinton as a First Lady who redefined the job—major redefinition” is the punch line.

And yet, so far, the gang that you wouldn’t think could shoot straight has done remarkably well. They’re even playing the crazy card—the card that, counter-intuitively, they seem to most like to play—deftly.

Partly, this is luck. The Republicans, so far, are struck pretty much dumb. Bush and Cheney have created a sense of something like guilt, or embarrassment, or, even, disgrace, among the faithful. Potential candidates on the traditional right seem to be hiding under a rock—they don’t want the Bush-Cheney taint. So to find yourself a nationally admired figure (a kind of apple pie), in a field where something like 70 percent of likely voters (many your natural ideological enemies) still haven’t expressed any opinion about the race, and where the opposition includes the 70-year-old John McCain, who both hates and sucks up to Bush (therefore getting neither advantage), and Mitt Romney, a Mormon from Massachusetts, that’s luck. What’s more, choosing a relative social liberal—just at the moment when the religious right seems to have lost its way—with supersonic national-security cred might be a way to combine independents with Reagan Democrats, along with the South (which you get anyway), and for the Republicans to actually, miraculously, win.

The other thing is that there is no one, including Hillary, who has as much direct experience dealing with the media as Rudy and his people do—they’ve played in New York.

Indeed, Rudy is long over the biggest media hurdle. He’s famous in a way few politicians are. He sells papers. He moves the news. It’s a different media algebra when you are already famous and you seem to screw up—that may make you even more famous. Your flaws are not so much flaws as a kind of cream on top. We’re privileged to know more about you.

A famous person’s nuttiness is of an entirely different order than an unfamous person’s. The big issue with nuttiness is that it’s secret or shameful. But, in a sense, publicity cleanses or absolves nuttiness. That is, it makes it normal. We’re used to it. What’s more, with Rudy, there’s so much of it that sheer volume cancels the details out.

And, in some significant way, the nuttiness is the point. Rudy is reversing the basic political math, where likability = electability. Rather, it’s Rudy’s extremism, his vividness, the joie de guerre of his obsessions and fixations, his beastliness, that give him his chance. He ought to flee from his wife’s advice and stay away from those necessarily mealymouthed Barbara and Oprah interviews—that’s no place for a son of a bitch. These days the biggest Republican sin, bigger even than supporting abortion or gun control, may be the sin of the flip-flop. And that’s the marvelous advantage Rudy has to offer his party. You can better trust a crazy man, lacking normal artifice and equivocations, not to shit you.